Explore Big Data
With Cisco UCS
Big data bombards IT infrastructure
every minute of every day.
Capitalizing on information can make the difference in an
increasingly competitive and time-sensitive world. That’s
why many companies are turning to big data solutions
that can help them make better decisions in less time.
Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®)
provides the extreme scalability your business needs
to quickly mine a large amount of data and turn it into
actionable intelligence for strategic advantage.
Why Infrastructure Matters
Taking advantage of big data requires processing
massive amounts of information and quickly delivering
answers under fluctuating workloads. As your data
stores increase in size, your big data solutions must
perform, scale, and be resilient—without sacrificing
management and operation efficiency.
Cisco Delivers Fast Insight for Less
Big Data Originates in Many Places
What is big data? Big data encompasses the collection,
storage, and analysis of massive amounts of information,
including data from web logs, sensors, tweets, blogs,
user reviews, Short Message Service (SMS) messages,
and data-intensive Internet applications. The data is
characterized by high volumes of extremely large data
sets that are predominately unstructured.
6 New Wikipedia Articles Published
Cisco UCS integrates industry-standard, Intel® Xeon®
processor-based servers with networking and storage
access into a unified system. Server, networking,
storage, and intelligent management resources work
together in a self-aware and self-integrating system.
This design delivers greater computing density and
network simplicity in a smaller footprint that reduces
operating costs for big data applications.
3000 Photo Uploads
30 Hours of Video Uploaded
Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture for Big Data
The Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture (CPA)
for Big Data extends the strengths of Cisco UCS by
offering computing and network scalability, performance,
management, and monitoring that yields essential
operation simplification, modularity, risk reduction, and
lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Integral Cisco UCS fabric interconnects offer a single
connectivity and management plane for scale-out
designs using both single-rack and multirack form
factors. Cisco UCS virtual interface cards (VICs) enable
unified fabric for single-wire management and direct
SAN access. When applied to big data workloads, the
architecture yields compelling performance advantages
and significantly lower operating costs for companies
across industries such as finance, healthcare, insurance,
and government.
100,000 Tweets
61,141 Hours of Music
20 Million Photo Views
2 Million Search Queries
What Happens in an Internet Minute
1300 New Mobile Users
20 New Victims of Identity Theft
US$83,000 in Sales
47,000 Application Downloads
© 2014 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
6 Million Facebook Views
1.3 Million Video Views
204 Million Emails Sent
Page 2
Scale to New Heights
Big Data: A Growing Trend
Software Solutions
Oracle NoSQL
Database
Oracle Real
Application Clusters
DataStax
MarkLogic
ParAccel
SAP Analytic
Applications
SAP HANA
SAP ASE
If your company is experiencing tremendous growth
in the kinds and amounts of data generated, stored,
and analyzed, you are not alone. Finding ways to costeffectively scale computing and storage capacity can
mean the difference between real-time insight and
missed opportunities.
Harness More Computing Power
With Cisco® technology, your data center can handle the
most complex workloads. Big data clusters supported
by hundreds of servers and petabytes of storage allow
your IT department to scale solutions to meet big data
demands. Up to 160 Cisco UCS servers are supported
in a single switching domain, and you can add Cisco
UCS Central Software to connect up to 10,000 servers.
Up to 10,000
nodes for scalable
processing power
Flexible scalability
to support any size of
cluster or big data
application
Large memory
Leading Hadoop Distributions
Take Advantage of Architectural
Scalability and Simplicity
configurations so more data
is readily accessible
MapR
Pivotal
Petabytes
Cloudera
HortonWorks
Cisco SingleConnect technology provides a single
consistent way to connect blade and rack servers and
physical and virtual machines. It establishes a logically
centralized system in which connectivity is physically
distributed among server racks and blade chassis in
the form of low-cost, low-power-consuming fabric
extenders. A single system can house both big data and
enterprise applications. After the system is established, it
can grow without the need to add switching components
or redesign system connectivity or new points of
management.
• Fewer network hops between servers
Tens of thousands
Leading Storage Solutions
Cisco UCS Common Platform
Architecture (CPA) for Big Data
• Consistent latency between nodes
• Single point of management
© 2014 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
of storage from leading
storage vendors
Scalable I/O
bandwidth for high data
throughput
of supported applications
Page 3
Accelerate Data Loading and Access
Gain Insight in Less Time
Cisco and its storage partners make it easy to load
terabytes of data into systems. The combination of direct
access to high-performance SANs, high I/O bandwidth,
and the solid-state memory-acceleration of Cisco UCS
Invicta™ Series Solid-State Systems helps ensure that
your data gets into systems and accelerates database
operations so that applications and your business can
respond in real time.
Innovations in Cisco UCS, down to the applicationspecific integrated circuit (ASIC) level, deliver excellent
big data performance. These innovations can help you:
IndustryLeading
Database
Performance:
34% Faster1
26% Greater
Profit When
Using DataBased Analysis2
• Run big data and analytic applications better and
faster across the end-to-end fabric at the core of
Cisco UCS
• Accelerate the flow of information to your decisionmaking processes with unified management that
coexists with your business application infrastructure
• Analyze information faster by using more servers and
distributing data-loading and analysis tasks to take
advantage of massively parallel processing
Automate Big Data Processes for
Improved Business Intelligence
Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (TES) facilitates the
flow of large quantities of data among applications
such as Hadoop, enterprise resource planning (ERP),
database, data warehouse, and business intelligence
applications. The software automates the scheduling of
processes that move data in and out of your big data
file systems, running data feeds from inside and outside
your firewall and processing big data workloads.
© 2014 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Nearly every
company can
benefit from
faster access
to the right
information.
Get World-Record-Setting Performance
The balanced resources of Cisco UCS, including highperformance processing, impressive I/O bandwidth, and
large memory capacities, can help you achieve more
performance with your big data implementations. Cisco
UCS servers with versatile Intel Xeon processors have
captured more than 90 world performance records with
first-to-market results or results that exceed those set
by other system vendors, including Dell, HP, and IBM as
of the date of disclosure. Please visit http://www.cisco.
com/go/ucsatwork to learn more.
1. Based on TPC Benchmark C Results on 2-processor systems as of January 1,
2014. Cisco UCS C240 M3 High-Density Rack Server with Oracle Database 11g
Release 2 Standard Edition One,1,609,186.39 tpmC, US$0.47/tpmC, available
September 27, 2012, compared to IBM Power 780 Server Model 9179-MHB
with IBM DB2 9.5, 1,200,011.00 tpmC, US$0.69/tpmC, available October
13, 2010. TPC Benchmark C is a trademark of the Transaction Performance
Processing Council (TPC).
2. The article The Advantages of Digital Maturity in the November 2012 MIT Sloan
Management Review shows that companies using big data analytics (along with
social and mobile efforts) were 26 percent more profitable, with 9 percent more
revenue and a 12 percent higher valuation than their competitors.
Page 4
Deploy one rack
at a time.
Accelerate Infrastructure Deployment
Cisco UCS Manager abstracts server identity,
personality, and I/O connectivity from the hardware
and applies these characteristics automatically to new
systems. This capability means that your IT department
can reduce deployment time from days to minutes
and replicate configurations easily and accurately for
accelerated deployment and fast and easy growth
patterns.
• Remediate problems faster for continuous access to
applications
• Prepare for the future with a system that is optimized
for virtualization
Wire your
infrastructure once.
• Manage a single system or multiple systems
worldwide with Cisco UCS Manager and Cisco UCS
Central Software
• Interoperate with existing management tools
through the Cisco UCS XML management API
Improve Visibility and Control
Cisco UCS Manager provides end-to-end management
of all devices in the Cisco UCS platform. This visibility
enables the monitoring and automated remediation of
physical servers, storage, and network devices. You can:
• See what is happening in your infrastructure
3. From the Principled Technologies Test Report comparing deployment of Cisco
UCS B200 M3 Blade Servers to deployment of HP BL460c Gen8 blade servers,
July 2013.
77 percent faster deployment3
so your IT department can get big data
solutions working for you in less time.
© 2014 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Add servers and
storage.
Point and click to
configure.
Page 5
Deliver Big Data Infrastructure in a Small and Efficient Footprint to Reduce TCO
Is IT Infrastructure Holding You Back?
Simplicity That Saves Time and Money
Lower Infrastructure Cost
The Forrester Forrsights Budgets and Priorities Tracker
Survey Q4 2012 reports that more than 70 percent of IT
budgets is spent on capacity expansion, maintenance,
and support—leaving less than 30 percent for IT
innovation that supports business priorities. Imagine
what you could do if your IT department could rebalance
that equation and help your company implement big data
solutions that can change the way you conduct business.
In Cisco UCS, all I/O traffic meets at a single
and redundant point for efficient and consistent
management. This approach eliminates blade-server
and hypervisor-resident switching, condensing three
network layers into one. With 20 percent fewer
components and automated configuration, your IT
department can reduce capital and operating costs and
improve IT efficiency for big data implementations.
The capability to conserve capital expenditures (CapEx),
reduce operating expenses (OpEx) through the
efficient use of power resources, and simplify operation
processes has helped Cisco UCS customers save in
comparison to the cost of traditional servers.
• Single fabric
With Cisco UCS, your IT department really can do more
with less. IT staff can perform more tasks with less
effort, manage infrastructure better with fewer tools,
and increase capacity in a smaller footprint—all of which
translates to lower TCO and improved productivity.
With the time and money saved, your IT staff can get to
work on the big data solutions you’ve been waiting to
implement.
Other Approaches
• Centrally managed, physically distributed system
• Unified management of blade and rack servers
• Fewer adapters: one Cisco UCS VIC compared to two
to four adapters for competing solutions
• Fewer management points
• 20 percent 3-year TCO savings5 for Cisco UCS
C240 M3 Rack Servers compared to HP DL380p
Gen8 servers,in a Cisco UCS CPA v2 configuration
with 16 nodes
4. Based on the Cisco UCS manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) IBM retail
price available at ibm.com on August 8, 2013.
5. Based on the Cisco UCS MSRP and HP retail price available at hp.com on
January 2, 2014.
Cisco UCS
Storage
Fibre Channel
Connectivity
• 45 percent 3-year TCO savings4 for Cisco UCS
C240 M3 Rack Servers compared to IBM x3640 M4
servers in a 100-node configuration because Cisco
SingleConnect technology uses fewer I/O adapters,
Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches, and cables
NetApp FAS Storage
End-of-Row Ethernet,
Fibre Channel, and
Management Network
Switches
Ethernet or Fibre
Channel Connectivity
Top-of-Rack Ethernet,
Fibre Channel, and
Management Network
Switches
Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects
Cisco Nexus Fabric Extenders
10-Gbps Unified Fabric
32 Rack Servers in 2 Racks
32 Rack Servers in 2 Racks
Cisco UCS Reduces the Number of Management Points, Simplifying Infrastructure Deployment and Reducing TCO
© 2014 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 6
Many IT professionals
aren’t ready for big data.
Are you?
For More Information
6%
13%
13%
15%
2%
• To learn more about Cisco UCS, please visit
http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs.
IBM
Microsoft
Cisco can help you reveal
the business insights
hidden in your data.
High R&D Investment in Innovation
Cisco
Intel
HP
• To learn more about Cisco UCS performance, please
visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsatwork.
6. Source: Yahoo Finance, company financial statements for the latest reported
fiscal year.
Conclusion
Every business decision is critical, so companies
around the world look to big data solutions and analytic
applications for better insight into their businesses. Now
you can deploy business-critical tools on Cisco UCS and
create scale-out solutions for powerful decision making.
With the capability to add more high-performance
computing and storage resources as data and user
demands grow, your IT department can scale and deliver
the right information at the right time.
7. Results from TheInfoPro Servers and Virtualization Study, Wave 12, December
2012.
8. Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker 2014Q1, Vendor Revenue
Share.
US$5.8 Billion
Internal Innovation
R&D Investment as Percent of Revenue6
Customer Satisfaction
7
Number-1 x86 Blade Server Vendor in North America8
Americas Headquarters
Cisco Systems, Inc.
San Jose, CA
Asia Pacific Headquarters
Cisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.
Singapore
Europe Headquarters
Cisco Systems International BV Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.
Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned
are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R) LE-41901-00 06/14